Tagged with “brain”
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Right now, billions of neurons in your brain are working together to generate a conscious experience — and not just any conscious experience, your experience of the world around you and of yourself within it. How does this happen? According to neuroscientist Anil Seth, we’re all hallucinating all the time; when we agree about our hallucinations, we call it "reality." Join Seth for a delightfully disorienting talk that may leave you questioning the very nature of your existence.

Cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman is trying to answer a big question: Do we experience the world as it really is … or as we need it to be? In this ever so slightly mind-blowing talk, he ponders how our minds construct reality for us.

02016 marks The Long Now Foundation’s 20th year and we are holding our first ever Long Now Member Summit to showcase and connect with our amazing community on Tuesday October 4, 02016 from noon to 11:30pm, at Fort Mason Center in San Francisco.

David Eagleman will be giving the keynote talk on "The Brain and The Now" and will be joined onstage after his talk by Stewart Brand and Danny Hillis for further discussion and Q&A.

Scents and tastes are powerfully evocative — one whiff of perfume or cooking aromas can transport you back to a particular moment, a particular place, a particular person.

Because the things we smell reach two brain structures called the hippocampus and amygdala in just one synapse, scents can almost immediately stimulate the key brain areas for memory, emotion, and location.

In this episode of Totally Cerebral, Dr. Wendy Suzuki speaks with neuroscientist Howard Eichenbaum, an expert on olfactory memory, and together with chemist Kent Kirshenbaum, sits down to a meal with Chef Anita Lo to hear how she plays with our senses and our memories in her delicious creations.

This episode was hosted by Wendy Suzuki and produced by Julie Burstein, with editing and sound design by Derek John. Wendy Suzuki’s book Healthy Brain, Happy Life, goes on sale May 19, 2015.

"Why do we like and dislike certain foods? The most important thing in the tasting process is not the tongue, nose or ears – it’s the brain." Barry Smith explores how the brain makes us capable of language, thinking and feeling.

If the conscious mind—the part you consider you—is just the tip of the iceberg in the brain, what is all the rest doing? Neuroscientist David Eagleman, author of the New York Times bestseller Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain, shows that most of what you do, think and believe is generated by parts of your brain to which you have no access. Here’s the exposé about the non-conscious brain and all the machinery under the hood that keeps the show going.

Almost everything in modern life is designed to waste energy. The whole system evolved on a false premise that petroleum is cheap and plentiful and will be that way forever. The awesome Lisa Margonelli, author of Oil on The Brain and a fellow at the New America Foundation, talks us through the design of a world that completely disregards the perils of oil consumption and how new designs are meant to make us all more content with the mess we’ve made.

Will we be able to jack into the brain and upload helicopter instructions, like in The Matrix? We already have the technology to control a prosthetic arm or Twitter with thoughts alone. Dishes of neurons can control a robot. And scientists have created a working artificial memory chip in rats.